Now Voyagers: Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano, Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein, Book One: The Night Sea Journey

Here is the long awaited sequel to James McCourt’s first novel, the comic masterpiece, Mawrdew Czgowchwz. In gloriously flamboyant prose, James McCourt in Now Voyagers tells the story of the charged atmosphere surrounding a legendary diva (and possible CIA agent) turned psychoanalyst. This rich and brave novel about the opera world and New York in the mid 1950’s is touching, inventive, and outlandishly funny. Susan Sontag called James McCourt, “a literary countertenor in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov.”

“Tragic wisdom, we discover, can also be le gai savoir, and James McCourt has made a real specialty of transforming intricate wisdom into no more than discerning frivolity, no less than divine frenzy; as he puts it: a running neon paradigm of the quintessence of divadienst! For the purposes (if that is not too grandiose a word) of such fiction, fun is fun, but folly a kind of fate.” —Richard Howard